Situation awareness
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
Situation Awareness, or Situational Awareness
Originally an aviation term used in human factors to describe awareness of tactical situations during aerial warfare. It has now been adopted throughout aviation, and increasingly in transportation and other dynamic complex systems requiring human control.
Situation awareness (SA) is important for effective decision making and performance in many domains, including aviation, nuclear power, chemical processing, automobiles, air traffic control, medical and health systems, teleoperations, trains, space operations, maintenance, and advanced manufacturing systems. In these complex and dynamic environments, human decision making is highly dependent on SA — a constantly evolving picture of the state of the environment. Situation awareness can be described broadly as a person’s state of knowledge or mental model of the situation around him or her.
A general, widely applicable definition describes SA as “the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning and the projection of their status in the near future” (Endsley, 1988). SA involves perceiving critical factors in the environment (Level 1 SA), understanding what those factors mean, particularly when integrated together in relation to the decision maker’s goals (Level 2), and at the highest level, an understanding of what will happen with the system in the near future (Level 3). These higher levels of SA allow people to function in a timely and effective manner.
An individual's understanding and classification of the situation he or she is in forms the basis for all subsequent decision making and performance. Even the best trained people will perform poorly if their SA is incorrect. One study of aircraft accidents found that as much as 88% of all accidents attributed to human error had an underlying problem with SA (Endsley, 1995). Other studies have found that a similarly high percentage of human error problems stem from poor situation awareness, which often results from deficiencies in the system capabilities or displays provided to their operators. In addition, people can vary significantly in the degree to which they are able to develop and maintain SA in a given situation. Factors contributing to these differences include experience (which helps to build up relevant memory stores for pattern matching to incoming information), and individual cognitive abilities (including factors such as attention sharing ability, spatial abilities, pattern matching ability, perceptual speed, and working memory). Training programs can be used to help people develop better SA by helping to build relevant skills (including communications skills, scan patterns, and contingency planning) and by helping to build a large repetoire of relevant memory stores. (Endsley, 1995)
Endsley, M. R. (1988). Design and evaluation for situation awareness enhancement. Proceedings of the Human Factors Society 32nd Annual Meeting,Human Factors Society, Santa Monica, CA, 97-101.
Endsley, M. R. (1995). A taxonomy of situation awareness errors. In R. Fuller, N. Johnston & N. McDonald (Eds.), Human factors in aviation operations (pp. 287-292). Aldershot, England: Avebury Aviation, Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Endsley, M. R. (1995). Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors, 37(1), 32-64.
